commands and only carrying out the taxation which others have
devised? Indeed, he himself has stated such to be the fact. If,
therefore, a terrible and unforeseen fate overtook the usually
cautious and well-armed Ping Siang, doubtless--perhaps after the
lapse of some considerable time--another would be sent from Peking
for a like purpose, and in this way, after a too-brief period of
heaven-sent rest and prosperity, affairs would regulate themselves
into almost as unendurable a condition as before.

"Therefore ponder these things well, O passer-by. Yesterday the
only man-child of Huang the wood-carver was taken away to be sold
into slavery by the emissaries of the most just Ping Siang (who
would not have acted thus, we are assured, were it not for the
insatiable ones at Peking), as it had become plain that the very
necessitous Huang had no other possession to contribute to the
amount to be expended in coloured lights as a mark of public
rejoicing on the occasion of the moonday of the sublime Emperor.
The illiterate and prosaic-minded Huang, having in a most unseemly
manner reviled and even assailed those who acted in the matter,
has been effectively disposed of, and his wife now alternately
laughs and shrieks in the Establishment of Irregular Intellects.

"For this reason, gazer, and because the matter touches you more
closely than, in your self-imagined security, you are prone to
think, deal expediently with the time at your disposal. Look twice
and lingeringly to-night upon the face of your first-born, and
clasp the form of your favourite one in a closer embrace, for he
by whose hand the blow is directed may already have cast devouring
eyes upon their fairness, and to-morrow he may say to his armed
men: 'The time is come; bring her to me.'"